Page 17 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 1 Fall 2012

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the real story from the children of The Sound of Music.”
Taking in the brilliant sunsets over the mountains and
surveying the endless stretches of green that emerge
through a dense fog each morning, it’s easy to imagine
why, in 1941, his paternal grandparents, Georg (a.k.a.
the Captain or the Baron) and Maria von Trapp, chose to
settle their 10 children in the Green Mountain State, with
its resemblance to their ancestral Austria.
“I have these vague memories of watching The Sound
of Music once when I was six or seven,” says von Trapp,
who returned home in the summer of 2007 to help his
father run the lodge, a family resort that, including the
96-room Austrian-style Main Lodge and the surround-
ing villas and guest houses, can accommodate up to
1,000 guests. “But my parents really downplayed it and
I never really understood just how big it was.” He next
saw the film at age 23 – in Spanish.
Even through college at Dartmouth, von Trapp rarely
associated himself with Julie Andrews’s memorable
singing and frolicking among the hills of Austria. Being a
von Trapp was “all I knew,” he repeats. “Nothing special.”
Just as his family’s tale contains elements of fiction,
the story of von Trapp’s return to the lodge does as well.
The popular version is that Johannes von Trapp, Sam’s
father and the youngest of the Baron and Maria’s three
mutual children, gave his son an ultimatum – spend 10
years after college doing whatever you want, but then
you must come home to run the lodge. He did just that,
traveling the world to surf in Chile and teach skiing in
Aspen. He became fluent in Spanish and Portugese. He
moonlighted as a skiwear model for Ralph Lauren, filmed
a ChapStick commercial with Olympic skier Picabo
Street, and was named in 2001 by People magazine as
one of “America’s Top 50 Bachelors,” a distinction that
has brought him an imbalance of pride and discomfort.
“Coming from this Sound of Music family, defining
ourselves on our own was really important to my sister
and me,” he says, “to make sure there were things we
had done that weren’t connected to the family.”
In reality, von Trapp always aspired to join the family
business. “On my first boarding school application to
Eaglebrook, I wrote that when I grew up I wanted to run
the Trapp Family Lodge,” he says.
The Baron and Maria von Trapp